Digging deeper into the WP8 SDK: Chat rooms, Xbox Music collections?

start screen lightSince we put together our list of revelations coming out of the leaked Windows Phone 8 SDK, bloggers and developers have been digging even deeper into the bits, and have come up with a few more gems.

Once developer David Hanson-Granville got hold of the SDK it didn’t take him long to discover, and then blog about what’s coming in Windows Phone 8, which we found via WMPowerUser.  Hanson-Granville first wrote about the game development platform, summing up his blogging in a set of bullet points:

  • Managed xaml lives on in WP8
  • winRT is nowhere to be seen
  • 3 Screens development story not being realised in this release.
  • Native code now available on the platform
  • XNA is left out of the WP8 party
  • If you want to build games then dig your C++ book out

What he found next may be even more interesting to the non-developer audience, a number of references to what sounds like a new private “chat room” or “Google Hangout” type experience:

Digging through the resource files I have numerous mentions to “rooms” being supported.  From what I am gathering this feature would be an addition to the groups functionality whereby you should be able to add a group of your friends to a chat room and all chat live.  Super cool!

This resources are used by the contactsres.dll in system32 and I have a couple of snippets for you below.

“Gather your friends and family together. Invite them to a private Room where you can share a calendar, photos, group chat and notes. Or add them to a Group to see social updates from just those folks and text them all at once. Tap the plus sign to get started.”

What could be better than a new “hangout” experience on Windows Phone (and beyond?) where you “tap on the plus sign” to get started?

WMPowerUser wasn’t done yet, either.  They also found references  in a screenshot (via Plaffo.com) to an “Xbox Music cloud collection”:

sdk41

WMPowerUser suggests that this “cloud collection” storage will be separate from your regular SkyDrive storage, but we’re wondering if your “cloud collection” might not be individual physical storage at all, or if it might even be streaming rights to songs you’ve “collected” with an Xbox Music Pass.  We certainly don’t know enough yet about Xbox Music to know for sure.

If you haven’t been brave enough to download and install the leaked bits yourself, here’s a nice set of screenshots to tide you over, thanks to a comment from Techman on our earlier post.



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